1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to technology for identifying dynamic groups that correspond to an entity, such as a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the growth of the Internet, the use of networks and other information technologies, Identity Systems have become more popular. In general, an Identity System provides for the creation, removal, editing and other managing of identity information stored in various types of data stores. The identity information pertains to users, groups, organizations and/or things. For each entry in the data store, a set of attributes are stored. For example, the attributes stored for a user may include a name, address, employee number, telephone number, email address, user ID and password. The Identity System can also manage access privileges that govern what an entity can view, create, modify or use in the Identity System. Often, this management of access privileges is based on one or more specific attributes, membership in a group and/or association with an organization.
In many instances it is useful to identify the groups corresponding to a user. For example, an employee at a company may want to know all the groups that include the employee as a member. Ideally, an Identity System would be able to create a list of such groups for the employee. Providing such a list can be very computation intensive when all or some of the groups are dynamic groups—groups that identify membership with a filter instead of a static membership list. One implementation of a filter or rule specifies attribute values an employee profile must contain in order for the employee to qualify as a group member.
The Identity System may need to determine a user's dynamic groups by comparing the user's profile to each dynamic group's filter, even though users typically belong to much less than all of the groups. This comparison can consume substantial processing time and memory bandwidth. In a directory based Identity System, each dynamic group comparison requires a separate directory access of the user's profile. It would be desirable for a user's corresponding dynamic groups to be identified more efficiently in some circumstances.
In order to avoid the identification of dynamic groups, some systems maintain dynamic filters for group membership in user profiles. The group filter in a user profile dynamically defines one or more groups that include the user. In this scheme, all of a user's groups can be identified by a single directory access of the user profile. This solution, however, does not allow system administrators to organize users through the implementation of group profiles. This can be a significant drawback. The use of dynamic group profiles is a popular scheme for grouping large numbers of entities, such as users. Without the use of dynamic groups, the creation of a new group may require the updating of each group member's profile.
Some Identity System users also employ an Access Systems. An Access System provides for the authentication and authorization of users attempting to access resources. For efficiency purposes, there is an advantage to integrating the Identity System and the Access System. For example, both systems may utilize a single set of group objects that identify user membership in various groups. Additionally, integrating the Identity System and the Access System allows for single-sign-on functionality across multiple resources. Thus, there is also a need to efficiently support the identification of a user's dynamic groups for Access Systems and integrated Identity/Access Systems. Systems other than Identity and Access Systems can also benefit from the efficient identification of a user's groups.